I remember reading this in the early 1980s as a recent teenager hot on the heels after finishing The Late Great Planet Earth -- a prophetic prequel to Countdown to Armageddon written in the '70s -- and being hooked by the conspiratorial tone and dire predictions of gloom and doom and apocalypse that were unequivocably certain to occur no later than December 31, 1989, just as the 1970s were certain to be the decade of the Rapture and Armageddon Lindsey had initially predicted would transpire in his first book of contrived "prophecy."
Nevertheless, The 1980s, Countdown to Armageddon, was a good, even fascinating read ... for a fourteen year old dweeb hooked on fantasy at the time (the Thomas Covenant trilogy by Stephen R. Donaldson) but in hindsight, looking back with adult eyes, I'm a bit more than dismayed by Lindsey's -- a reported "reputable" Christian evangelist with his own television audience -- repeated untrue predictions.
It's one thing to be a megolomaniacal nut job and form some U.F.O. cult and herd a horde of gullbile human-bovines out to the desert ranch (sans all their possesions) for the almighty alien's arrival and the glorious impending transformation to a higher plane of spiritual consciousness; but even as bad and sad as that conscienceless con job is, it's far worse, I think, when you're a supposed man of God with flocks of old folks under your "care," tuned into their TV sets, to completely misinterpret the Book of Daniel or Ezekiel or Revelation and imbue prophetic meanings into contemporary happenings in Israel or Russia or wherever, as if those books of antiquity were speaking directly to the latest world crisis, when in fact they were speaking symbolically to events in their own ancient times, Mow-ron! Inexcusable, the fear, and misguided decisions such books elicit in people who placed their trust in the prophetic preacher man on the tube. How many duped people need to get taken to the cleaners before these charlatans get their comeuppance?
I could get all snarky and claim that Hal Lindsey's fatuous books on "end times" and The National Enquirer bear a striking resemblance, but I'd hate to insult the integrity of The National Enquirer like that.
Hal Lindsey YouTubes on End Times
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Hal Lindsey's Pretrib Rapture "Proof"
ReplyDeleteIs Hal Lindsey's proof for a pretrib rapture "100 proof" - that is, 100 percent Biblical?
In "The Late Great Planet Earth" (p. 143) Lindsey gives his "chief reason" for pretrib: "If the Rapture took place at the same time as the second coming, there would be no mortals left who would be believers" - that is, no believers still alive who could enter the millennium and repopulate the earth.
We don't know if Lindsey's amnesia is voluntary or involuntary, or if he needs amnesia rehab, but earlier (p. 54), while focusing on chapters 12 through 14 of Zechariah, Lindsey sees "a remnant of Jews in Jerusalem" who are mortals who will become believing mortals at the second coming and then become repopulating mortals!
During the same discussion of Zech. 12-14 Lindsey overlooks some of the final verses in Zech. 14. They reveal that some of the tribulation survivors "of all the nations which came against Jerusalem" will refuse to go there "to worship the King, the Lord of hosts." Here's what will happen to those "heathen" rebels: "upon them shall be no rain."
So the facts about the repopulating mortals, in unbelieving as well as believing ranks, cancel out Lindsey's "chief reason" for opposing a joint rapture/second coming - the ONLY rapture view to be found in official theology books and organized churches prior to 1830!
(See historian Dave MacPherson's "The Rapture Plot," the most accurate and most highly endorsed book on pretrib rapture history - available at online stores like Armageddon Books etc. Also Google "Scholars Weigh My Research" and "Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty.")
Although Hal Lindsey claims that his "Late Great" didn't set a date for Christ's return, many of his followers - including copycats Bill Maupin ("1981") and Edgar Whisenant ("1988") - did view Lindsey as a date-setter, and his later book "The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon" (the sort of title that date-setters and their ga-ga groupies love) became another fizzle - unless we're still living in the 1980s!
In Old Testament days false prophets were stoned to death. Nowadays they're just stoned!
(saw above web item - Carlos)